I run BAT and McIntosh components and, to my ears, have never heard ANY difference while demoing PS Audio, Black Sand, Straightwire, Cardas, Parasound, Power Wedge and Jellyfish AC cords...

Maybe you should consider yourself lucky? Believe me I'd rather all power cords, interconnects, speaker cables sounded the same.

The audible difference will decrease as you improve the quality of power in your house and as your gear gets more stout power supply. BAT and Mac actually end to have robust PS.

On the same token, as you optimize the interface between 2 components, the audible difference among interconnects will diminish. Low source output impedance matched with benign input impedance and following capacitance of various kinds will do this trick.

Unfortunately, most of us simply don't live in the ideal world.

Let's also not forget various DIY options that can give you great sound quality. The "Asylum cord" is reportedly nice, especially for source components, and the VH cords have been around for a long time.

One can go quite exotic if one wishes.

The bottom cord is my DIY cord, which involves wrapping pure silver ribbon around a foamed-teflon copper coax, teflon-taping it all, then heatshrinking. The live and neutral legs are then "cross-connected" to lower inductance. The thing sounds fabulous, but it's so difficult and even dangerous(!) that I couldn't make another one even if Donald Trump wanted to pay me to do it...

Since McIntosh amps have low input impedance I often wonder if it would make sense to construct an IC with high impedance to better match a preamp requiring high output impedance???

It might worth a try, but IMHO I'll still go with an low impedance cable for that situation. As from electronics point of view, there is really no receiving side that would need to be driven by an high impedance source. At least not with our current analog signals.

I have a power conditioner at home, and noticed here at the hotel, there is a jitter like noise at times. Like peak times when many people are awake and/or using thier computers or watching TV. Kinda like peak times or I dunno 5-11pm.

I can tell you though, I left my IeGo power cords at home for my DAC and the difference once I got them here, was fairly dramatic, and unexpected. Why? I'm guessing burn-in? They were being used on the computers and stereo at home, so they've been getting burned in for a couple weeks before they got to me here in Vegas. The difference was pretty marginal. Especially when quieting down the jitter-like noise of the hotel power coming from the wall.

Well, I personally have thought that the power cable would not do much sometime ago, it was quite revealing when I found out otherwise.

I have also found that the internal cabling of the equipment have a drastic effect on the performance of the power cable. If the internal wiring for the AC input is rather crappy, it will literally tune out the effect of a better power cable. For some reason, the closer it is to the circuit, the more effect that a power cable can have. Maybe that's why some of the more expensive equipments with rather elaborate power supply can still benefit from good power cables.

Thank you for the useful descriptions of all of the IeGO power cords, Jon. I, too, have had my eye on these PC's for a little while now, and it is very helpful to have comparative descriptions of them all. I'll very likely purchase a 3 m length of their least frills cord.

Thank you for the useful descriptions of all of the IeGO power cords, Jon. I, too, have had my eye on these PC's for a little while now, and it is very helpful to have comparative descriptions of them all. I'll very likely purchase a 3 m length of their least frills cord.

Have you tried them out already? I bet you must be a little surprised about how flexible the cable is.

Jon,
Thank you for the fine and thorough review, which greatly assisted me in my decision to try the IeGo 70530+8055. The IeGo has proven to be one of the most pleasant and cost-effective additions to my listening rig in quite some time: quiet, tonally sophisticated, smooth and expansive, yet remarkably detailed and well-paced are the adjectives that come first to mind. In short, I'm very glad I gave them a try! : )

I used the stock cord on the PPP itself when I first got it, because that was all I had. Swapping in a better cord made just as big a difference (to my ears) on the PPP as it did on my source and amp. I also tried switching the cords (different makes/models) between my amp and source when they were attached to the PPP and heard the same differences in sound as I did before the PPP was in place. In other words, the PPP didn't magically remove the utility or erase the sound of the better power cords.

I'm a firm believer in power cords as you know. I just don't understand though, if the PPP is really doing what it claims to be doing, why should you hear any difference in sound quality regardless of what cord you place on the IEC? The PPP is supposed to be generating "new" power; it's supposed to be "your very own power station" -- converting AC to DC and then back to AC again. If the power coming out of the PPP is pure and with exact sine wave patterns, I don't understand why the input power cord would make any difference at all. If it does, the PPP is not doing what it claims.

The PPP is supposed to be generating "new" power; it's supposed to be "your very own power station" -- converting AC to DC and then back to AC again. If the power coming out of the PPP is pure and with exact sine wave patterns, I don't understand why the input power cord would make any difference at all. If it does, the PPP is not doing what it claims.

Not really. Think of PPP as an amplifier (which it is) that takes power from the wall just like any other amp, then generating a power output to supply other components. The power cord and power quality PPP receives will impact how good a job PPP's internal amp can do to regenerate and supply power.

Then there are the "on-line" pure sine-wave regenerators that are decoupled from the wall AC, power cord from wall,etc, regenerating power purely from the internal battery with an inverter.

I thought that's what the PPP was supposed to do. If it doesn't come off of a battery, how can it truly generate its own power? That's false advertising on PS Audio's part then.

PS Audio is not false advertising. They have never claimed they are regenerating power from a battery reservoir. Per their website:

"...Inside the Power Plant is a very powerful 1500 watt amplifier fed by a low distortion sine wave generator.

The internal power amplifier's output is what produces the AC power for your equipment and the sine wave generator feeds the input of this power amplifier with perfect AC."

So, if you unplug the PPP, it will stop working. If you unplug a on-line, dual-conversion UPS, it will continue to work until battery drains. Such a device regenerates power from the battery whether it's plugged or not.

While a cheap non on-line UPS will still work after being unplugged, it's making ugly rectangular waves instead of sine, and these are not regenerating power from the battery UNLESS it's unplugged.